Like many of us, I've been a big fan of what Giant Bomb East have been doing lately. I've always felt an exceptional video feature for this site usually contains some extra edge or idea beyond than everyone sitting around commentating while one person plays a new game, which is of course the essence of a video game website but is already adequately covered by Giant Bomb's "meat and potatoes" free content - the Quick Looks and Bomb/Beastcast appraisals. Conversely, building a video feature that involves the entire group and has special rules to follow is a distinct break from the norm, and the sort of video feature I hope both sides of Giant Bomb will explore in the future for their various Premium shows. GBE in particular is great about this: Steal My Sunshine, 13 Deadly Sims and The Exquisite Corps (even if I think XCOM was a bad choice) are great series buoyed by imaginative ideas at their core. (And, just so I'm not playing favorites, GBW's Ranking of Fighters, Game Tapes and Demo Derby are all great examples of what I'm talking about also.)

I thought I'd try my hand at pitching a few video features ideas for GBE, inspired by their recent output. I don't imagine they'll actually try any of the following, but this is more in the service of commending the recent directions they've taken and hoping for more content like it. It's also just fun putting those knuckleheads through some hypotheticals that'll test their patience, if not with the challenges inherent with each than at least with Dan Ryckert, who features heavily in all three:

That's enough pitches to be getting on with. Whether they try some variation of the above or something equally convoluted (and prone to an unpredictable process I can only call "The Ryckert Effect"), I'm looking forward to watching what they produce once E3's done and dusted. Before then, however, we have some of this week's blogs to check out:

• The Indie Game of the Week for the first week of June is Super Time Force Ultra, a chaotic but highly enjoyable run-and-gun shooter from Capy Games, the developers behind Superbrothers and the long-awaited Below. I say this much in the review, but the game's great feat is inventing a bunch of perplexing time-travel mechanics and making the game fun and accessible in spite of them. There's challenges if you're looking for them, but the game's more invested in having fun - the game's dopey sense of humor should tell you as much going in - than really forcing you to stop and tactically consider your next course of action.
• Tuesday's SNES Classic Mk. II: Episode XI: Cecil B. DeMup covered Shin Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun: Kunio-tachi no Banka and Final Fantasy IV. The former is a forgotten entry in the Kunio-kun brawler franchise that escaped a localization back in the day, and plays like a late Double Dragon entry with their expanded fighting move repertoires. However, I'd argue its core appeal is in the overwrought tough guy crime story about a pack of fugitive delinquents taking on Japan's underworld to clear their name - there's a certain mix of drama and levity that reminded me a lot of Sega's Yakuza franchise. The latter game probably needs no introduction: as the first 16-bit Final Fantasy, it established a difficult bar to surpass for the SNES RPGs that followed, and features one of the most memorable (if relatively straightforward) stories and casts in the franchise. In the blog, I likened it to the A Link to the Past of the franchise: highly accessible, and highly emblematic of the games to follow.
• Finally, we end May Maturity with its last game: DreamForge's Anvil of Dawn, with its Intro blog here and Outro blog here. Despite a promising beginning, I found the game tiresome before too long due to its insistence of making every dungeon far bigger and more elaborate than they needed to be. There's a definite kernel of a great game of its type - the real-time first-person dungeon crawlers that rose to prominence after Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder - with the imaginative settings and monsters, the handful of themed dungeon-specific puzzles, and some then-modern features like player-made map annotations, which were only a thing previously in the Ultima Underworld series, or the way the player sets the pace of combat by how fast they attack, slowing it down if they need to heal, select a specific spell, or make a quick escape. But man, it just became enervating to tackle those giant dungeons after a while, each of which seemed to have the same assortment of irritating teleporters, spinners, and rolling rock traps.

Addenda

TV: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Season 4, Part 1)

I was sad to hear that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt might be ending after this season is over, because it's a very appealing sitcom that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves. I guess that's a symptom of it being a show created for digital distribution, rather than on cable, and it can be difficult to navigate the huge number of options provided to Netflix viewers (or Amazon, or Hulu, or any of the seemingly dozens of services of their type) for gems. It does help that the show has some pedigree behind it: it was created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, who previously worked together to create the sublime 30 Rock. The dark pitch of the show is about a teenage kidnapping victim who is rescued from a bunker some two decades later and has to adjust to adulthood and how much the world has changed, but is blessed with so much positivity and willpower that the show somehow feels lighthearted in spite of its premise.

The core strength of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is its very talented ensemble cast of actors. In addition to the wonderful Ellie Kemper in the titular role, who injects Kimmy with so much childlike energy and naivety that I half wonder if she has to inhale Pixy Stix between each take, there's also her flamboyant and workshy roommate played by Tituss Burgess - Fey and Harlock discovered him during 30 Rock's tenure, and you get the sense that the Titus Andromedon role isn't too far from how he is in real life, give or take a few idiosyncrasies and a certain obliviousness that makes the character such a great comedy invention - and her streetwise but ditzy landlady played by Carol Kane - who has elevated everything I've ever seen her in, from Scrooged and The Princess Bride to this. Rounding out the cast is Jane Krakowski, returning from 30 Rock to play a similarly demented character blinded by privilege and arrogance but in a way that makes her sort of endearing, and a few excellent recurring guests like Jon Hamm, who plays Kimmy's kidnapper and does an incredible self-deprecating job playing a misogynistic sleazeball.

The other big advantage the show has is the breakneck pace of its jokes, which are delivered at a rate that almost makes you want to pause and absorb them all before continuing. That's especially true of the show's many freeze-frame gags involving signs, websites and other written data that flashes on the screen briefly. One great gag from this season involves a rich tenant that Krakowski's character is trying to remove from her sub-letted apartment, and while coming up with a plan that involves using his smartphone to accidentally call his wife, you can see all the fake names that fill his address book. They look just pretend enough to feasibly be the sort of weird names rich people give their kids, but on closer inspection are actually the fake names from Fighting Baseball: a SNES game with a Japanese localization that was forced to came up with fake English-sounding names for the American athletes since they lacked the original's MLBPA license, with varying levels of success. It's the sort of ridiculous goof at the expense of the goofy elite class of the US - a vein from which both 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt mine a lot of comedy gold - that makes each episode a joy to dissect.

I've been with this show for four seasons, and I highly recommend starting from the top if you've yet to watch it. Season 4 sees the show is at its peak, with some great recurring gags already and a political undercurrent that explores the ridiculous entitlement of certain groups of men on the internet, highlighting just how ludicrous their assertions are and how they'd be drawn to a figure like Jon Hamm with his quasi-religious harem of submissive kidnapping victims. If this is to be the last season - and given the counterproductive way Netflix is splitting this season up into six episode chunks spaced eight months apart, that seems likely - I hope it goes out on a bang and that Fey and Carlock keep their particular rapid-fire routine going for more shows to come.

Movie: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Like many this month, I felt almost obligated to check out the new Star Wars movie; a compulsion that has grown weaker with each new entry since The Phantom Menace. Solo is, like Rogue One, a prequel to the original trilogy that sets up some background story elements from that trio that probably didn't need further expounding. In this case, it's how Han Solo got his start, met Chewie and Lando, acquired the Millennium Falcon, and completed the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, which is how he introduced himself and the ship to a skeptical Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker way back when. That all these events seem to happen over a weekend makes Han Solo's life seem considerably less eventful than we're led to believe - one can only surmise that he pulled off an endless procession of unremarkable, routine smuggler jobs for Jabba the Hutt for the intervening decade or so before that fateful meeting in the Mos Eisley Cantina.

To ensure the movie is more than just empty fan service, it is - again, like Rogue One - built to be a more grounded adventure unlike the standard "save the universe" epics of the various trilogies. With Rogue One, it was this scrappy Dirty Dozen-like war movie about the courageous but doomed act that would save the Rebellion, while Solo sets itself up more like a heist movie, complete with a team of specialists and a lot of late-game double-crosses and betrayals. It has some exciting sequences, like the Kessel Run shortcut and a train robbery (though, as RedLetterMedia's review pointed out, it's a little weird that the Empire needs to rely on trains for highly valuable cargo when it has spaceships everywhere), and for the most part the central roles are well-acted. Alden Ehrenreich can't quite match Ford's charms, but he at least manages to get down the energy and cocky self-assurance of the character, while Donald Glover's Lando Calrissian is really just a protracted Billy Dee Williams impression that is nonetheless a lot of fun. The newer characters, like Emilia Clarke's love interest Qi'ra or the slightly satirical feminist revolutionary droid L3-37, fare less well, and the various other rogues Han Solo meets and learns from - like Woody Harrelson's Beckett and his companions - end up with an oddly small amount of screen time. There's also the shocking cameo people are talking about that, without hopefully giving too much away, isn't all that surprising to anyone who has been keeping up with the excellent Clone Wars and Rebels animated series. I find it strange that the new movies haven't had the courage to add a random Rebels character in there for that fanbase, but I suppose there's only so much of the whole spin-off/gaiden universe those directors can feasibly expect people to follow - a problem that the Kingdom Hearts franchise regularly runs into, and will again once Kingdom Hearts III is out.

So, overall, I'd say Solo: A Star Wars Story is a competent movie - when you consider its (eventual) director Ron Howard, "competent" is usually the first word that comes to mind, and not always in the most positive sense - and shouldn't piss you off if you're one of those who felt aggrieved by the liberties that The Last Jedi took. That said, of the ten Star Wars movies so far, it feels the least essential: there's nothing to learn in this movie that you didn't already know about Han Solo from the stories he tells us in the original trilogy, and I don't see the various ancillary characters making much of a splash in the movies to come. It feels like the first Star Wars movie to exist purely to please fans, possibly an intentional move by Disney to appease the crybabies who felt so attacked by the new trilogy, and while it doesn't deserve to be trashed - there's very little actually wrong with the movie, in terms of missteps - I can totally see why it's underperforming. I'd say if you just want an entertaining popcorn sci-fi heist movie or really really like the characters of Han Solo or Lando Calrissian, maybe check it out, but otherwise you could probably safely wait until it hits streaming services or not bother at all.